Hi @kevin5284, thank you for taking the time to answer questions.
In addition to @alanh, questions (and forgive me if this what the second question is asking, or has appeared below his post - I’ve struggled to read so many comments) my question is based on the fact that I have created some 40 plus courses and support and have improved some 200 other courses (many by users no longer here, where I think of myself as a Curator or Custodian).
Qu : When courses are transferred to Decks, will ‘Contributors’ AUTOMATICALLY have the same editing (and maintenance) rights?
@deco1546 yes we are looking into either removing the timer or allowing users to turn it off on Decks. I can come back to you in the next few weeks when I have more clarity on this
Hi @kevin5284
Could you tell us more about official Memrise courses? Are you gonna do major upgrades to them or just slowly add few bits here and there? It seems that without community courses there is not much of content on Memrise left IMO and official courses are pretty basic
While the very idea of keeping apart two different platforms may have sense from both technical and learning points of view the way Memrise doing it is so questionable.
“Free” and “Forever” sound like fun, but what we really see is a freaking lot of scepticism and negativity towards this decision. There was hardly even one positive voice and probably that should activate an alarm bell. Memrise is silent in social media pages about Decks, which is also quite weird in my point of view (sister site about which you are prefer not to talk, yeah?).
Memrise are not even recounting positive perks (just like there’s none), not trying to explain anything, nor reassuring sceptics. Maybe you are not entitled to speak in details, well, then bring here your boss. Just compare your superficial answers (nothing personal) with the users’ posts who are so passionate about their loss.
It’s like I’ve been invited to a party which actually is a someone’s funeral and perhaps it really is. The atmosphere around this announcement is oppressive. Let me remind you that this is still a small fraction of the Memrise users and negativity will only grow stronger, because nobody’s likes to lose their favorite app.
In regards to your responses here and Ed’s post, there’s a very clear contradicition: you need money to support your project and at the same time you are doing so much (sometimes by not doing anything) to disappoint your loyal customers. Moreover, you are saying that you do not need customers money. It’s a nonsense and there’s something wrong. Maybe the users should just pitch in and buy out this product from you. It looks like a heavy burden to Memrise.
@alanh@Angharad.Merfin@theprophe we are working on it. It’s annoying for us too that the Memrise website isn’t great on non-desktop devices!
We’re aiming to make the whole Decks site mobile (and tablet) friendly apart from Course Creation and Groups, which we think are features that are best used on a big screen.
Thanks @amanda-norrsken@Angharad.Merfin for the suggestions. I’ll incorporate them into the proposal I’m writing and and share it around for feedback soon
Hi @t0panka yes the idea is to do major work on the official courses, not just tweaks. Ed talks a bit about this a bit in the Decks blog post at the bottom
One good thing with this all is that the community cares and raises issues. It means the situation is still open for fixing. The other option is apathy and the course creators just abandon the platform and with that any goodwill and free marketing created by an active and happy community will go away – and in the crowded language learning world it’s expensive to market products compared with free labor. It could still happen if no direct actions to address the concerns the community has raised:
no offline mode
no mobile app
Compared with other language learning systems and tools Memrise has an active content creation community – to let it fall apart due to lack of long-term support and listening would be a sad example of a company that lost one of their most valuable assets – evangelists.
Terrible timing, or maybe, great timing… I was about to sink huge efforts into creating intermediate and someday advanced courses for Japanese. I’m far from the best at course creation, but I’ve taught at colleges before (math,) and do know how to make courses at that level. I suppose, as they say, I dodged a bullet. I’m furiously frustrated, tho. I didn’t want to have to figure out anki in the last week or two of me finishing RTK.
I’m staying… for now. But mostly only so I can hang around after D-day and watch everything go to sh*te (and probably make mocking comments at them on the forum until I inevitably get banned, because I’m a sour cow like that).
I’d already finished their official German courses (the old ones – the new ones suck) and glanced at a few other languages that took my fancy, but I only ever used Memrise for vocab acquisition really – hence my using mostly frequency courses, Duo vocab lists and specific, targeted vocab that goes along with my general interests. I need to start downloading courses if I want to keep hold of any content that’s actually useful to me, I guess (man, that means setting up Anki… not fun).
Also, imagine how far my ‘learned words’ counter is going to drop after this : O
I need to start downloading courses if I want to keep hold of any content that’s actually useful to me, I guess (man, that means setting up Anki… not fun).
It’s not. -_- I’m currently doing it. I have downloaded into anki the main course I was using here, RTK. Interestingly, there isn’t a single official course I’m going to download, but there are a dozen of user created ones I am.
ok, then the team one could maybe find a way to allow the user have some very basic options for customizing the dashboard and the learning/review pages?? some very basic options that would not consume too many resources?
for my part, I found it extremely learning-disrupting whern the UI was site changed back in 2014 and then continued to change, sometimes the changes came every second month.
If I remember well, the team was trying to close the gap between the design of the app and that of the site, but the results…: the ugly colours, the huge tabs, the much info crowded in diff. colours in the space around the course tab, the disapperance of “pin”, the deletions of most mems, etc…
I am using an long userscript, which obscures goals, the clock, the ugly colour of “difficult words” (is still that lila colour?), and some other stuff. If of any interest, I can PM you my main userscript - which is simply a compilation of usersscripts and css lines as posted in here, in the old fora, on userscript.org and github - as an example of what some people consider disturbing on the current site.
